Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett (R) has made it his mission to make his city healthier and less obese, in part by improving its walkability. The city lost a million pounds during his weight-loss campaign — and then they took a freeway out of the middle of downtown and overhauled its built environment.

Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett is doing some revolutionary things in a conservative city. Photo: ##http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/2011/03/23/oklahoma-city-attracts-businesses-gets-healthy-with-smart-growth-principles/##Flickr##

I interviewed Mayor Cornett last week when he was in Washington, DC for the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors. In the first installment, posted yesterday, Cornett described the excitement among city officials when the rules changed and they were asked to think outside the car-centric box. He said they built sidewalks and parks and bike trails with locally-raised funds, even over the objections of the fire and police unions. And while he welcomes federal money for projects like these, he’s at peace with otherOklahomans who see things differently — though he worries that less federal funding will result in less equality among cities.

So now you’re all caught up. Here’s Part Two.

Tanya Snyder: It seems like there are more and less successful ways of talking about [livable cities] with different people. You have a pretty conservative constituency. Does it hurt the cause that Michelle Obama is out in front on obesity, and does it hurt the cause that walkability is associated with sustainable development, is associated with Agenda 21, is associated with climate change initiatives — what you’re doing is nonpartisan, you’re just trying to get people fit and healthy.

Mayor Mick Cornett: There is some pushback about — as you mentioned, Agenda 21 and anything that comes out of the White House. But at the end of the day, people elect mayors to get things done. You might elect a Congressman to go up and stop something. But you don’t elect a mayor to stop things form happening. You elect an executive branch person — a mayor, a governor, a president — to do things.

I close with this: “We’re creating a city where your kid and grandkid are going to choose to live.” And they know it’s true.

So I’ve never let that slow me down. I will say that one secret to our success is that we’ve been able to convince the suburbanite that their quality of life is directly related to the intensity of the core. And so they have continually passed initiatives to support inner-city projects, sometimes at the expense of the suburbs.

TS: How did you do that?

MC: Here’s what I do. I try to win an intellectual argument. I stand toe-to-toe with a lot of retired suburbanites who don’t like downtown, don’t like me, are tired of funding taxation. I’m serious, they have more negativity than you could possibly imagine.

And when I’ve lost on every turn and every argument in this debate that takes place in neighborhood after neighborhood I close with this: “We’re creating a city where your kid and grandkid are going to choose to live.”

And they know it’s true. Because in Oklahoma City, my generation left. If you had an advanced degree, there wasn’t a job for you. And so people left. They’re now in Houston and Dallas and New York and Washington, DC and Tokyo and all sorts of great places. We raised a lot of really smart people. They’re gone.

Very talented young people left to go get a job somewhere else. And now they’re coming back. Our population increase is double its traditional average. We used to grow about 1 percent a year and now we’re well over 2-percent-a-year population growth. And our unemployment rate is the lowest in the country — 4.5 percent.

So how do you explain that? How do you have all these people coming, over a thousand people a month to the city, another thousand in the metro area, yet our unemployment rate remains the lowest in the country by a considerable amount?

There’s jobs there. It’s economic development. These highly educated twenty-somethings are flocking to the city and the job creators and entrepreneurs are just growing the economy exponentially. They see all that and they realize quality of life is really the key to economic development for a city. We didn’t invent that but we were on the front end of figuring that out. We figured that out 20 years ago.

TS: You say people move to Oklahoma City not just from your suburbs but from California, from the east coast. People think of that migration going the other way. What do you attribute that to?

MC: I attribute it to quality of life. Quality of life means different things to different people. We have very affordable housing, so a young person right out of college can buy a house in Oklahoma City. We have virtually no traffic congestion in this city. We have an abundance of fresh water and clean air.

Is this the way to attract jobs to a city? Mayor Cornett says they're building sidewalks so people don't have to drive everywhere -- and it's a big quality-of-life improvement. Photo: ##http://www.newson6.com/story/15583625/where-does-this-oklahoma-city-sidewalk-go##News on 6##

So, you talk about quality of life, you’ve got to have things like sports; we have a major league NBA team now, we have a very large commitment to the arts. You have to have it all. But the quality of life in Oklahoma City is amazing when you compare it to the east and west coasts. What people take for granted on the east and west coasts — long commutes, long lines in traffic, unaffordable housing — in Oklahoma City, none of that exists!

And so, when they start seeing how far their housing dollar goes, and the quality of life that they can have there, it’s just easy to live in Oklahoma City. You don’t put up with all the hassles of other places.

TS: Congestion is another thing I wanted to ask about. It’s easier to make the argument for alternatives to the single-occupancy vehicle when you can tell every day on your commute that driving in a single-occupancy vehicle is not sustainable. It’s not working for you. It’s actually less convenient; it’s more expensive. That’s not true in your city. Driving probably is the easiest and quickest and most convenient way to get around. Does that make it harder to make the sale?

MC: Well, yeah. So our successes are very impressive to us. In the grand scheme of things, most people are still moving to the suburbs as opposed to downtown. Most people still choose a 10- or 15-mile journey to work — which only takes 10 or 15 minutes.

We virtually had no downtown housing 10 years ago. The only people we had living downtown were people in jail. We had fewer than a thousand, probably, living downtown. And the demographics of the downtown culture have completely changed. I live downtown.

TS: Do you know how many people live there now?

MC: Yeah, it’s a couple thousand. But there’s probably a thousand units under construction right now. So like I say, for us, it seems like there’s a lot of people moving downtown. But in the grand scheme of things, in a city with 610,000 people and a thousand new people a month, it’s still just a small percentage.

But I remember talking to [former Denver mayor, current Colorado governor] John Hickenlooper about Denver, because I thought his city had conquered this great inner city migration, and he told me the same thing. He said 90 percent of the people are living in the suburbs. It just looks like a lot of people.

TS: Your 2 percent growth rate though — is that in the inner city?

MC: Well that’s in the city limits. Our city limits are very large. It encompasses 620 square miles.

TS: You rebuilt I-40 and integrated it into the city in a way that worked for you. A lot of urbanists think you need to get freeways out of cities, and it seemed like you used it as a gateway to get people to notice the downtown. How did that work?

MC: We moved I-40 from downtown just a few blocks to the south, and used that as an opportunity to create a new park and a new boulevard along the old route. It had to be done. So how’s the city going to react to it? We think we reacted very positively to it. We used it as an opportunity to redefine downtown.

TS: You talked about the connection between jobs and sidewalks and the riverfront park and things like that. You’ve said that people don’t follow jobs anymore; jobs follow the people. Is that what you’ve found in Oklahoma City — that people aren’t necessarily moving to where they can find a good job, they just move to where they want to live?

MC: We learned the hard way that we were trying to attract jobs by incentivizing businesses to move to our city. What we learned is, if we create a better city for us, people will move jobs to our city because they know their employees will be happy there.

Dell moved a couple thousand of jobs to Oklahoma City — or created them; they were brand new jobs. And one of the things their guy told me was, “We spend a lot of time and energy training our employees. We can’t afford to locate a facility in a city where we don’t think they’re going to stay. They’ll leave Dell, not because they’re dissatisfied with us, but because they don’t like living there.”

So they can only afford to locate in cities that understand the quality of life element. And that validated everything we had been trying to convince ourselves was true. We didn’t really know it. We thought it was true.

We had to learn, because [20 years ago] United Airlines was looking at building a maintenance facility and we put the best incentive package on the table they chose Indianapolis, in 1992, to build this plant. And the CEO told us it was because, “We couldn’t imagine our people living in Oklahoma City.” And that changed everything.

TS: Where were you 20 years ago?

MC: I was a television sportscaster.

TS: So you weren’t part of these conversations.

MC: I wasn’t at all. I was in the media. And a few years later I became a City Hall reporter. I was a news anchor and I covered City Hall. So I was on the other side of all these things.

I grew up in OKC and it has always had an effective, nondramatic executive. I would say though that, outside of downtown, capitol, heritage hills area the city has serious, serious structural problems. It is still almost entirely car-dependent. I mean, just look at that photo. Is pouring a sidewalk on NW 793rd street going to make it walkable? Probably not, because there’s nothing of interest. Where I grew up, on the SW side, you could walk for miles and miles and see nothing. There’s literally nothing on Penn between SW 104 and SW 119, for example. You can stand at a “busy corner” and still be 400 yards from anything because of all the parking lots.

So although I congratulate OKC for its relative improvements, I think the place is still doomed. And I would also add that it’s easy to take pot-shots at California and New York when the infrastructure improvements in your state are funded by a +150% net flow of federal tax dollars, which are funded by the net flow of taxes out of populous coastal states.

Anonymous

Fantastic interview! So important to show cities that you can do a whole lot even if you aren’t NYC, DC, SF, etc.

Anonymous

@google-b4610b92810b55bfee0be46cc2c11586:disqus I did like that the photo source was an article questioning why the city would spend money there.

Still, it’s nice to see a story about what’s happening in a heartland city.

Roger

I think that stating that OKC is doomed is a bit over-the-top. It may not have much in the way of mass transportation right now, but a light rail system is coming in a few years (funding is already secured for it). Urban density is nothing like some of the older cities along the east and west coasts, but that is also beginning to change. Cities, especially in the age of the car, don’t start as dense urban paradises, they progress there. You must not have been to OKC in a while.

it’s a strong pursuit to have a brighter future for our kids and grandkids in the midst of the most challenging economic downturns in history. But who says we cant build that dream.

DANIELLE

I have to say, I live in OK now, and some of the things the mayor reported to her just aren’t true. Maybe its in the works (and he should’ve disclosed that), but there is no boulevard and park where the freeway used to be–just abandoned buildings and a Ford warehouse. I don’t know who lost the million pounds–maybe the employees forced to sign up at City Hall. There was NO major citywide push for weight loss. You can look around our city almost anywhere and see that obesity is commonplace. There are no new sidewalks (although Devon Energy has a beautiful building no one can enter), and all of the City’s money ends up as property tax dollars in the outlying suburb of Edmond. If Mayor Cornett was serious about funding all of these projects, he’d force those City employees to reside in the city! Or put a toll road up between OKC and Edmond! Most of the city’s traffic is between those cities, so volume would be covered. I think the toll road would be the best–look at the PGB Turnpike crossing the Dallas Metroplex.

Lance

While only a couple of the MAPS3 projects have started any construction it takes time to collect the roughly 800 million it is projected to cost from a one penny sales tax and do all the work you don’t see done (getting designs finalized, land acquired, permits approved and contracts awarded). It is still fairly early in what is at least an eight year project, which normally does get mentioned as just getting started in most interviews I have seen from him.

They only finished tearing down the old elevated freeway structure that was on the land the boulevard will be built in the last few months and the property for the park was just recently finished being purchased from the various owners, with a couple buildings already leveled for it.

Outside of MAPS3 and Project180 on sidewalks, there has been tens of million of dollars spent going back in areas that had none over the last couple years, the fact is between the 40’s and 90’s sidewalks were not a priority of the city and left out of many areas, it will take decades to ever catch up on that front.

Hey Joe thanks for reminding me of all the reasons I left OKC! Better watch out for the Muslim homosexual feminist shock troops who are coming to take your guns and marry your daughters off to the blacks.

Garrett Gee

It’s nice to see parts of downtown and midtown slowly but surely coming alive. Between the “smart streets” initiatives, bike share and townhouse development, OKC is trying to revive what really are some excellent, if neglected assets in the urban core.

GTElmore

Through his assistant David Holt (now one of the state senators gutting state government), good-‘ol Mayor Mick threatened the citizen advocates of preservation and reuse of elegant OKC Union Station. “I have a thousand cops I’ll sic’ on you,” said Holt – to ME, in the public lobby of the Mayor’s office.

Cornett proved to be a staunch ally of former state “transporation czar” Gary Ridley, subject of Streetsblog’s second “revolving door” segment a few years back. (As Ridley told me – “WELL, Tom – there WAS a time when we didn’t even have to ASK you what you thought!)

OKC Union Station has now been stripped of ITS yard – and turned into a functionally eviscerated trinket – sorta’ like one of those little concrete gnomes – in a “big new 40-acre front yard” for Devon Energy Tower.

In significant part through Cornett’s compliant cooperation in the treacherous undermining and subversion of years of citizen advocacy that a June, 2008 victory for Union Station before the Federal Surface Transportation Board (Case AB6-430X) was flipped on its head with the destruction of Union Station’s elegant 12-track-wide, 8-block-long, at-grade train-handling facility beginning the week of 9-11-09.

Sorry – but the thesis of this report simply “doesn’t fly.”

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